Old Fashioned

by Robert Hess

Epicurious
September 2006

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Photo by Elissa Wiehn

This drink was featured as a Cocktail of the Month. Click here to learn more about the Old Fashioned.

The invention of the drink is frequently (and probably inaccurately)
credited to a bartender at the Pendennis Club, in Louisville, Kentucky, who around the turn of the 20th century reportedly made the drink for Colonel James E. Pepper, a member of the club and by some accounts a prominent bourbon distiller.

There's a strikingly similar cocktail in Jerry Thomas's 1862 How to Mix Drinks, or the Bon-Vivant's Companion, called the "Whiskey Cocktail." What probably happened at Pendennis, says Robert Hess, founder of drinkboy.com and cofounder of the Museum of the American Cocktail, was that the bartender served a Whiskey Cocktail made the old-fashioned way 
that is, the spirit combined with sugar, bitters, and water, the way cocktails were made as early as 1806.

Editor's note: Swap gin for whiskey in the recipe below, and you'll have an excellent Gin Old Fashioned.

Ingredients

1 scant teaspoon simple syrup

2 dashes Angostura Bitters, plus more to taste

1 half dollarsized slice orange peel, including pith

2 ounces good-quality rye or bourbon

1 maraschino cherry

Preparation

In old-fashioned glass, combine simple syrup and bitters. Fill glass halfway with ice, then stir about a dozen times. Add enough ice to fill glass. Squeeze orange peel over glass to extract oils, add peel to glass, and add whiskey. Stir just until drink is cold and alcoholic bite has softened, about a dozen times. Garnish with cherry, swizzle stick, and straw.